Keyword: profiling

In 2008, when I was recognized by the Conservative Party as the “Conservative Man of the Year,” they didn’t recognize me as the “Conservative Black Man of the Year.” My skin color played no part in the recognition. There is an element that is working to retard modernity by compartmentalizing people according to skin color. But even here we must point out their intellectual dishonesty and moral cowardice.

The White House has still refused to name the “American Muslim leaders” with whom President Obama met to “discuss a range of domestic and foreign policy issues.” According to a White House statement on the President’s meeting, the domestic issues discussed were the “Affordable Care Act, anti-Muslim violence and discrimination, the 21st Century Policing Task Force, and the upcoming White House Summit on Countering Violence Extremism.” On the foreign policy front, “the President discussed the need to continue countering ISIL and other groups that commit horrific acts of violence, purportedly in the name of Islam,” while also congratulating Muslims on...

Last week, the Obama administration announced new curbs on racial profiling by federal law enforcement. Before deciding whether this is good or bad policy, we might try to develop a description/definition of racial profiling or any other kind of profiling. A good definition of profiling in general is the use of an easily observed physical characteristic as a guess for some other, difficult-to-observe characteristic. The reason people profile is that information is costly and they seek methods to economize on information costs. One way to do that is through profiling. Imagine a chief of police in a city where there...

Facebook is working on software that could prevent users posting unflattering photos of themselves. Combining image recognition and artificial intelligence, the system would be able to distinguish between drunk and sober pictures. It would ask: "Are you sure you want your boss and your mother to see this?" The plan was revealed by the head of Facebook's artificial intelligence research lab. Speaking to Wired magazine, Yann LeCun said he wanted to build a Facebook digital assistant. In the future, this assistant might also be able to help identify when someone else has uploaded a picture of a user without permission,...

War On Cops: True to his word, Attorney General Eric Holder has released new national "anti-profiling" guidelines directing law enforcement to ignore "statistical evidence" generated by his own department. 'Even if there were overall statistical evidence of differential rates of commission of certain offenses among individuals possessing particular characteristics, the affirmative use of such generalized notions by law enforcement officers in routine, spontaneous law enforcement activities is tantamount to stereotyping," and therefore punishable, Holder warned in his 12-page guidance. "Even if?" Holder's acting dumb. He's fully aware such evidence exists. And it's highly relevant to proactive policing, because it shows...

In a heated exchange, PBS host Tavis Smiley told Sean Hannity thatâ€śracism is still the most intractable issue in this country, it's a part of everything we do still.â€ťÂ He made this claim while discussing the incidents surrounding the police handling of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.Â Mr. Smiley also stated, in refuting President Obamaâ€™s remarks on BET that we cannot compare what is happening now with what happened fifty years ago, â€śIt is open season on black men, and it is in many ways as bad as it was fifty years ago.â€ť The meme that Mr. Smiley and...

Attorney General Eric. H. Holder Jr. is expected early next week to detail long-awaited revisions in the Justice Department’s rules for racial profiling, banning it from national security cases for the first time. The changes will also expand the definition of profiling to prevent FBI agents from considering factors such as religion and national origin when opening cases, officials said.

It was after dark. I was taking a short cut to the convenience store through an alley. Ahead of me, a middle-aged white woman was walking down a side street and started to enter the alley. Upon realizing that I would be walking behind her, she made a quick turn out of the alley. Once inside the convenience store, I saw the woman come in. We were headed to the same destination, but she chose to take a different route. As a black man, should I be offended for being racially profiled? Well guess what? The night before, a late...

Facebook is mining its data of users' posts to find out how users feel about certain candidates or issues and sharing that data with ABC News and BuzzFeed for use in their 2016 reporting, the social-networking site will announce on Friday. The data will be gathered from the posts of Facebook users in the United States 18 and older, classifying sentiments about a politician or issue as positive, negative or neutral. The data can also be broken down into sentiments by gender and location, making it possible to see how Facebook users in the key primary states of Iowa or...

Sen. Ben Cardin said Tuesday that his legislation to prohibit law enforcement agencies from racial profiling had received renewed national attention after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., last month. Speaking at a briefing on Capitol Hill, the Maryland Democrat said the bill had "gotten new life" and that he hoped the proposal could forward this year. "How many more Michael Browns will we have?" Cardin asked. "We all know that profiling is un-American and wrong. We know it turns communities against law enforcement, where they need to work together."

A newspaper stated that some Muslim doctor is saying we are profiling him because he has been checked three times while getting on an airplane.The following is a letter from a pilot.This well spoken man, who is a pilot with American Airlines, says what is in his heart, beautifully. YOU WORRY ME! By Captain John Maniscalco, American Airlines Pilot I've been trying to say this since 911, but you worry me. I wish you didn't. I wish when I walked down the streets of this country that I love, that your color and culture still blended with the beautiful human...

In a rare triumph for common sense in Washington, it is being reported that the Justice Department intends to allow “tactical leeway” to the FBI to use ethnic profiling. This is welcome news for the security of our country. Profiling and stereotyping are a fact of life. Liberals vehemently argue that our law enforcement agencies should be prohibited from employing any form of profiling, arguing that you can’t tell anything significant about a potential terrorist just based on their religion, ethnicity or nationality. As is often the case, liberals manage to deny reality and embrace hypocrisy in one fell swoop....

Boise, Idaho (CBS SEATTLE) – An Idaho state trooper arrested and fully searched a 70-year-old Washington man’s vehicle solely because he had a Colorado license plate – a state where marijuana is legal – a federal “license plate profiling” lawsuit alleges. Darien Roseen was driving along I-84 between his second home in Colorado and Washington state on Jan. 25 when Idaho State Trooper Justin Klitch “immediately” pulled out from the Interstate median and began “rapidly accelerating” to catch up to Roseen, according to the complaint in a Courthouse News Service report. Exiting at a designated rest area, Roseen says he...

Jack Angelides was about to board a flight out of Israel’s international airport when he was given a curious choice that baffles him to this day. Traveling with a laptop and a stack of printed reading material, he was told to part with one or the other, due to unspecified security concerns. […] While standing in long lines, walking through scanners and removing belts and shoes are a fact of post-Sept. 11 travel worldwide, Israel’s Ben-Gurion Airport seems to stand alone in the developed world with its security techniques, often leaving travelers dumbfounded. Though Israel denies profiling travelers, business executives,...

School officials at the University of Minnesota are working with black student and facility organizations after they wrote a letter to the school’s president about the racial descriptions given in crime alerts. The letter, sent on Dec. 6, 2013, was issued by members of the African American and African Studies, Black Faculty and Staff Association, Black Graduate and Professional Student Association, Black Men’s Forum, Black Student Union and Huntley House for African American Males. It was directed to University President Eric Kaler and Pamela Wheelock, the vice president of University Services.

The U.S. Justice Department is likely to widen a ban on the profiling of suspects by race to include other categories such as religion, country of origin, gender and sexual orientation, a person familiar with an internal review said on Thursday. Broadening the ban would mark a major policy shift for U.S. law enforcement and would address a frequent complaint by minorities in America who feel they are singled out for unwarranted extra scrutiny. Federal agents have been prohibited from profiling potential criminal suspects by race in almost all cases since 2003, but complaints persist of the unwarranted targeting of...

I started programming when I was 5, first with Logo and then BASIC. The picture above is me, age 9 (with horrible posture). By the time this photo was taken, I had already written several BASIC games that I distributed as shareware on our local BBS. I was fast growing bored, so my parents (both software engineers) gave me the original dragon compiler textbook from their grad school days. That's when I started learning C and writing my own simple interpreters and compilers. My early interpreters were for BASIC, but by the time I entered high school I had...

The Justice Department will significantly expand its definition of racial profiling to prohibit federal agents from considering religion, national origin, gender and sexual orientation in their investigations, a government official said Wednesday.The move addresses a decade of criticism from civil rights groups that say federal authorities have in particular singled out Muslims in counterterrorism investigations and Latinos for immigration investigations.The Bush administration banned profiling in 2003, but with two caveats: It did not apply to national security cases, and it covered only race, not religion, ancestry or other factors. Since taking office, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has been...

Black students at the University of Minnesota say racial descriptions in crime alerts does not help catch suspects. Instead, it's hurting black male students. There have been more than two dozen crimes on or near the U this year. Crime alert after crime alert describes many of the suspects as young black males. [Snip] Ian Taylor, a junior and president of the Black Men's Forum, said many of their members have expressed concern over how other students treat them. "You might walk a certain side of the street and someone might walk the other way or the other direction…just this...

The New York Police Department had legitimate reasons to put mosques and Muslim worshippers under surveillance as part of its counterterrorism efforts, a city lawyer said Thursday at the first court date in a civil rights lawsuit accusing the NYPD of religious profiling. Peter Farrell of the city Law Department argued that before the case goes forward, the city should be allowed to present evidence specific to the six plaintiffs that he said would prove police were acting on reasonable suspicion. If the judge agrees, "then this case is over," he said. An American Civil Liberties Union attorney, Hina Shamsi,...

Washington D.C. woman says a weekend trip to see the movie, “The Butler” was marred by the presence of police inside the theater. Tiffany Flowers says she and her boyfriend, Alan Hanson, were attending a screening of the Lee Daniels film at the Regal Cinemas Majestic Stadium 20 theater in Silver Spring, Maryland Saturday, when the experience turned sour. She said that after waiting in line and having their tickets double validated, with the second ticket taker just ten feet from the first employee to tear their stubs, she and Hanson approached the theater entrance, only to find a police...

Outspoken Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio is opposing the appointment of an independent monitor and other moves to address a judge’s finding that his agency racially profiled Latinos, according to a court filing on Friday. The move could result in a judge ordering the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office to comply with constitutional requirements that ban the practice. In May, U.S. District Judge Murray Snow found that Arpaio’s office singled out Latinos, and that deputies unreasonably prolonged detentions, marking the first finding by a court that the agency engages in racial profiling. Arpaio’s office is appealing. …

The man who walks out of his house with a mind devoid of stereotypes is like the man who goes to the Antarctic without having inquired about the weather. But there is no such man: for even to know that the Antarctic exists is to know that it tends to be cold there. Our minds are necessarily full of stereotypes and we could not negotiate the world without them. George Zimmerman is accused by his detractors of having acted upon a stereotype. He saw a young black man allegedly pursuing an erratic course in a gated community and he concluded...

Fifty years from now, when college students read about the history of America’s criminal-justice system, August 12, 2013 may turn out to be one of those watershed moments: a day when America took a hard look at the human costs of its criminal-justice policies — and began to reverse course. This morning, Judge Shira A. Scheindlin delivered her decision in Floyd, et. al. vs. the City of New York, in which she blasted the NYPD’s practice of stopping-and-frisking people and ordered the appointment of an independent monitor. Meanwhile, in California, Attorney General Eric Holder announced this afternoon that the Justice...

22-year-old Jared Alexander said he was wearing a hoodie at a Boynton Beach mall when a security officer asked him to take the hoodie off. When he refused, other security officers showed up. Alexander said, “Why are you guys harassing me? I’m not stealing. I’m not going to take my hoodie off.” After a few minutes, he says, he had to go to work and so he left. He was met outside by police. Alexander says they handcuffed him and questioned him.

SAN FRANCISCO — U.S. aviation officials are no longer allowing foreign airlines to land alongside another plane when touching down at San Francisco International Airport in the wake of the deadly Asiana Airlines crash. The Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement Tuesday it implemented the change “to minimize distractions during a critical phase of flight.” In the past, two planes could approach SFO’s main parallel runways at the same time in clear weather. Domestic carriers can still do that, but air traffic controllers are now staggering the arrivals of foreign carriers.

Police arrested a 43-year-old Detroit man who attempted to break into Kid Rock's home. The man, who has not been identified, was arrested at his home north of Detroit after the singer offered a $5,000 reward to anyone who could provide information on him. Prior to his arrest, Kid Rock posted surveillance images of the suspect - who was notably wearing crutches during the attempted burglary - on his website and stated that he is an 'avid hunter and marksman' and 'will not hesitate to shoot anyone' who threatens his family. 'Don't mess with a mother****** like me,' the singer,...

BAY ST. LOUIS, MS (WLOX) - A Bay St. Louis pet owner believes a neighbor shot her dog out of irrational fear, simply because it's a Pit Bull. But the neighbor told police the animal charged him, and he feared for his family's safety. Four-year-old Matty is the Pit Bull that was shot. She's recovering at home right now. Matty's owner, Yolanda Christophe, said the trouble started after she got home from work Saturday evening. "Usually, I let the dogs off the leash to go use the bathroom as soon as I get home," Christophe recalled. "Maybe five minutes after...

THERE IS NOTHING MORE PAINFUL FOR ME AT THIS STAGE IN MY LIFE THAN TO WALK DOWN THE STREET AND HEAR FOOTSTEPS AND START TO THINK ABOUT ROBBERY AND THEN LOOK AROUND AND SEE IT’S SOMEBODY WHITE AND FEEL RELIEVED. REVEREND JESSE JACKSON NY TIMES, 12-12-93 Profiling is a very unsavory activity, we are told. There are marches against it and laws against it. Let’s consider what profiling is, starting with the definition of three terms relevant to the discussion : SNIP Here are some observable facts: 1. Rapes are primarily committed by men. 2. Major terrorist attacks, worldwide, are...

In the wake of the shooting of a Nazi officer, Police Capt. Louis Renault played by Claude Rains in the 1942 movie "Casablanca," ordered his men to "round up the usual suspects." Was Renault engaging in some sort of profiling? He may have been, but what is profiling? Let's look at it. We can think of profiling as a method to economize on information costs by using easily observed physical characteristics as a proxy for some other characteristic more difficult or costlier to observe. For example, say you seek to hire people to manually unload trucks containing heavy merchandise. I'm...

Frankly, I’m sick to death of all this talk about profiling. Everybody does it, even Big Guy: And eventually we’re all going to be profiled for one thing or another. Sometimes because of our race, White racists for Herman Cain Sometimes because of our political inclinations: And sometimes just because of our color. Racist chairs being set up for BHO’s second historical inauguration The fact is, profiling has become a fact of life: Even I’ve been profiled; in fact, mirrors have been profiled throughout the course of history. It’s even worse now though, with the advance of technology. To...

Eric Holder is going to hate this. The same day the Attorney General was condemning the “underlying attitudes, mistaken beliefs and stereotypes” that create racial strife, the City of Indianapolis was implementing the single largest case of racial profiling in the history of this country. This Friday and Saturday night, the streets of downtown Indianapolis will be full from some of the 250,000 black people attending the annual Indiana Black Expo. Much like George Zimmerman knew that black people were responsible for a crime wave in his town, city officials “know” the Black Expo has a ten-year history of intense...

I hate to admit it. Itâ€™s really quite embarrassing, humiliating really. But â€” even though I was an actual civil rights worker in the South and (crazy me) later gave money to the Black Panthers â€” in the interest of transparency (thatâ€™s what we all aspire to nowadays, isnâ€™t it?), I cannot tell a lie, George Washington:I am a racist. Worse than that, I profile.When I see a black gangbanger walking down the sidewalk toward me at night, sometimes I cross to the other side. Even if heâ€™s not wearing a hoodie.Ditto for skanky white guys in ponytails who...

Progressive faith leader Jim Wallis joined in on issuing commentary in the wake of the George Zimmerman acquittal. In a Huffington Post blog piece entitled, “Lament From a White Father,” he alleged that, had shooting victim Trayvon Martin been white, he would still be alive today. Wallis also pleaded with Caucasians — and parents, in particular — to “listen, to learn, and to speak out” about the tragic death. Race, he contended, was at the center of the incident from the start. “If my white 14-year-old son Luke had walked out that same night, in that same neighborhood, just to...

Why did the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman case become a national obsession? After all, about 14,000 murders take place every year in America. In just one city, Chicago, President Barack Obama’s adopted hometown, murders are on pace to reach around 400, down 27 percent from last year but on par with 2011. In 2012, only 26 percent of homicides were “cleared,” meaning the case was closed, with or without the killer being arrested or charged. That Martin, a black person, was killed by Zimmerman, described as a white Hispanic, is rare. Most homicides are same-race crimes. Most black killers kill other...

One reason Congress isn't popular is because it reeks of hypocrisy...and Jim McDermott stinks. Though we might disagree on issues, voters generally respect politicians who take principled stands. McDermott seems to be principled, but on the issue of profiling, the emperor of Washington's 7th Congressional District has no clothes. McDermott requested that the FBI's "Faces of Global Terrorism" posters be removed from Seattle buses, arguing that they could cause racial and religious profiling. The "faces" were of known terrorists from regions as disparate as the U.S., the Philippines, Malaysia, Africa, and Chechnya. One could argue McDermott's point while respecting his...

As this post from yesterday pointed out, it's hardly news to those who read the IRS IG report that Americans were targeted by the IRS -- not just based on membership in the "Tea Party" or "9/12" -- but based on their political sympathies generally. Last night, the Wall Street Journal reported on another example of this phenomenon. Apparently, an IRS probe of Freedom Watch began in (surprise!) the unit headed by Lois Lerner (still enjoying a full-pay and full-benefits vacation, courtesy of the taxpayers she harassed). According to the WSJ: In February 2010, the same month the tea-party targeting...

Yesterday, Stephanie Cutter, Deputy campaign manager for President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, appeared on Jake Tapper’s show The Lead on CNN. During the segment Stephanie Cutter admitted she had attended meetings with then IRS Chief Douglas Shulman at the White House: “A couple of facts here that I think are important for us to stick by, number one, the only reason we know about these visits is because the president makes everything public. Number two, what we’re really looking at some of these visits… What we are looking at the number of times that Mr. Shulman was cleared into...

Farhad Manjoo thinks the IRS scandal should teach the right something Imagine you're an overworked IRS employee, charged with finding, in your massive stack of 501(c)(4) applications, the groups most likely to make electioneering their main focus. Wouldn't it make a little sense to focus on self-proclaimed Tea Party groups? Sure it would. And there's a word for that shortcut, Farhad Manjoo at Slate observes: profiling. By making decisions based on surface details like a group's name, "the IRS was acting like the TSA agent who pulls aside the guy in the turban." Which is ironic, because the right...

The House Ways and Means Committee holds the first Congressional hearing on the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) subjecting applicants for tax-exempt status to higher levels of scrutiny based on political leanings. Witnesses include Acting IRS Commissioner Steve Miller who resigned on Wednesday and the Treasury Department’s Inspector General Russell George for Tax Administration. Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) said the IRS' targeting of "American taxpayers based on politics is both astounding and appalling." He stated that the Committee will "get to the bottom of this practice and ensure it never takes place again.” In announcing the hearing, Ranking Member Sander...

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor said Thursday the investigation into the Boston Marathon bombings shows how difficult and sensitive the issue of racial profiling can be. Speaking with young students in Denver, Sotomayor noted that some people asked whether authorities had done enough to track the two suspects, both ethnic Chechens. “Is that profiling? Could be,” she said. “Is it something you just can't ignore? Maybe sometimes not.” …

Tennessee police chief using lie detector to sniff out racists on his force The police department in Coopertown, Tenn. has been rocked by scandals for more than a decade. Their newest police chief, Shane Sullivan, is using a polygraph test to clean up the town’s image and keep bigots off his force. COOPERTOWN, Tenn. — A police chief hired to rebuild a tiny Tennessee department dismantled by scandal is using a lie-detector test to keep racists off his force. Coopertown Police Chief Shane Sullivan took over the department in November, becoming the 11th chief in as many years. He was...

It looks like the Barclays Center thinks Jay-Z fans are more likely to cause 99 problems than the upper-crust Barbra Streisand set. The arena forced the crowd at the rapper’s recent concert series to herd through its new airport-style metal detectors — while fans of the legendary diva were spared the same indignity at her show on Thursday. The security-policy switcheroo was blasted yesterday as a “double standard” that seemed racially inflammatory considering the audiences for each... Another tweeter quipped that for the Streisand fans, Barclays security should have employed “a brisket-sniffing dog!” Not only did the arena treat Jay-Z...

Jason Barnum is arraigned at the Anchorage Jail for attempted murder and other charges on Friday, September 14, 2012. Barnum was arrested at the scene of a shooting at the Merrill Field Inn on Thursday.

Perhaps we need an internment camp for white folks. Not all white folks. I know a lot of white people. Some of my best friends are white, and they are overwhelmingly peace-loving people. But we know who they are. White males between the ages of 18 and 45 who subscribe to an ideology of white nationalism. These people have similar physical markers and attire. They generally like to shave their heads and they wear black or camouflage military garb, and many wear white hoods for ceremonial worship. They subscribe to an ideology with historical roots we can trace back to...

Female G20 protestors sue Toronto police for $1.4MILLION after they were 'profiled for having hairy legs' A group of women is suing the Toronto police, saying they were profiled and arrested for having hairy legs during the G20 summit in 2010. The women are part of a $1.4 million lawsuit filed by seven friends, men and women, who were locked up during the protests against the gathering of world leaders. The lawyer for the friends, who had traveled to Toronto from their hometown to take part in the demonstrations, said police use of 'hairy legs' as a cause for detention...

Police Supt. Garry McCarthy — hailed as a “Braveheart”-like folk hero after getting out on the streets and leading his troops during the NATO Summit protests in May — is on the hot seat. His key strategy — doing away with mobile strike forces, which formerly were sent out to crime hot spots, and putting more cops back on the beat — has been called a failure by some. Now, McCarthy is preparing to roll out a new tactic. Social scientists who have studied murder say they’ve gotten to a point where they can predict who is most likely to...

PHOENIX (AP) — A trial will begin as scheduled on July 19 in a racial profiling lawsuit against Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio after the judge who will decide the case rejected handing the matter to another judge.